George Orwell

George Orwell (25 June 1903-21 January 1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was a British socialist author who was famous for his allegorical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, both of which criticized Stalinism and totalitarianism. Born in Motihari, British Raj, Orwell witnessed the oppression of the Indian people by the colonial authorities, and he developed his socialist views as a result of his experiences. Orwell attended Eton College in England at one point, but he was unable to attend such an upper-class school due to his moral beliefs, as he hated inequality. Orwell did not finish college, and he served in the colonial police in British Burma after leaving school, writing Shooting an Elephant in 1936 to describe the oppression of South Asians by the government. He later returned to England and wrote The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, and he decided to volunteer in the International Brigades and fight in the Spanish Civil War against the forces of fascism. In 1938, he wrote Homage to Catalonia to describe his experiences, during which he had been wounded. He would later become a critic of Stalinism with his books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he supported democratic socialism. He died in 1950 at the age of 46 of tuberculosis.